 All right, the great search is brought to you by Aydra and Digikey. Thank you so much, Digikey, for fueling this great search. Lady Aydra, what is a great search for this week? Well, we're a really big fan of this one. So we got a request on Discord doing our last great search. And mile high, 420, OK, anyways, a question for Lady Aydra. I would love to see a Digikey search on fans. I'm using an Ender 3 Pro 240 PSU and looking for a quieter placement for the 24 volt motherboard and hot end fans with comparable specs. What is considered quiet, anything under 24 decibels. My goal is to document it and to use as few voltage regulators as possible. OK, well, the good news is Digikey has a ton of fans because they're fans of fans. And there's a lot of them. And it sounds like there's a couple fans you want, but we're going to focus on the 24 volt hot end fan because we're going to do one item and then we'll do another one later. So two questions you had was, what's quiet? Well, it really depends on how ambient loudly your environment is. 24 decibels or 22 decibels or less is quieter. You're going to have a trade-off though. As fans get quieter, they get more expensive and they have less airflow. This is just how it is. If you want a lot of airflow, it's going to be really loud. Big fans are loud. You can make them quieter by spending more to get good quality bearings. But at some point, you can't get much quieter than some limit. The next question you had was, how to do it without voltage regulators? Because it sounds like if you want to use a 24 volt fan or a 5 volt fan, you'd have to convert the 24 volt control signal or power signal down to 12. But checking out Digikey, I think that we can find you a lot of 24 volt options. So let's go to my computer and take a look. So first up, let's just type in fan. So there's a lot of different types of fans. You can see there's even like AC fans and you know, parts for fans and heat sinks and stuff. But we want BLDC, brushless DC fan. And this is like 99.9% of all fans are going to see in electronics. You know, we use them for like a Raspberry Pi cooling. People use them for power supplies. People use them for computers, whatever. So you can see there's about 19,000 different options. Since we're looking for a replacement part and we're not doing a specification, like we're not buying a part to use it a product. We're looking just to replace it. I'm going to look for only active and in stock items, which is still 4,000 different fans. So the next thing that was the most important, I think is the voltage. If you don't want to use a regulator, you're really stuck with the voltage of the fan. Sometimes you can use slightly different size fans, but the voltage is the voltage of the voltage. So you've got a 24 volt DC system. You said 24V. So let's make sure that we're selecting a 24 volt fan. So still about 1,300 options. And what I really like is for fans, even the physicality of them is so important because usually there's not a lot of electronics. Maybe there's a tachometer. Maybe there's like a PWM signal, but for the most part, it's power and ground, maybe one day to line out. So looking at these fans, you need a good idea. So these are axial fans where the air is coming through. At least what most people think of as fans. There's also blower type fans. And I'd like to show you because I was looking at different 3D printers and some 3D printers use blower fans, not axial fans. So I thought I'd show you. A blower fan looks like this, right? The air, it's still spinning, right? You can see the round area where there's the spinning fan, but the air is curved out to point, and be directed in a certain location. So when I looked at Prusa hot air fans, they use a blower fan. Not as big as this. Some of these are like kind of massive, but they use a blower fan to really direct the air specifically to a spot. These are often used in computers and servers where you want to blow air over a CPU to get, you know, you don't have any air above or below to push, but if you do it this way, you can whoosh air over a hot thing and out a venting. So often, you know, when you see venting slots on the back or side of, you know, computers or devices or laptops or panel mount computers, you know, servers, that's what you're gonna see. But we don't want blower. We want axial. So I'm gonna do, it's just dual, not doable. We'll still pick two axial. Okay, so then what's interesting is that, you know, what you were asking for is a quiet fan. That was really important. And you can, luckily, because one of the things I really like about Digi-Key Search is that they have the specifications and they picked really good specifications. So noise is a spec that you can sort on. You know, sometimes you buy fans and you can sort by price and that's it or maybe size. Oh right, size was the other one. So one last thing before we go to noise. So I looked up the fan that you're thinking of and it's 40 millimeters by 40 millimeters square. Like fans come in like every single size. But if we go down and you'll see, you kind of have to like hunt and peck. There are two options. One is 40 millimeters by 40 millimeters and the other is 40.1 millimeter square. Why they did point one? I don't know, but you know, it'll probably fit. Right, cause it's so close. So we're gonna go there. 50 by 50 is also very popular. Not used in this particular case that this person's looking at, but I've noticed that 50 by 50 is a very generic size. Okay, so we're down to 117 options. So now all of the fans that we're talking about are 24 volt, they're the right size. I actually don't know how many wires you need for the fans in this 3D printer. So that you'll have to look up. I just don't own one. So look, is it three wires or two wires? But besides that, let's sort by noise. So you'll see here, you can see the noise in DBA and it can be incredibly loud, 52 dB, which is really loud, or 21 dB. If we sort by noise, bottom up, you'll note that at 14 dB, which is the lowest you can get, which is like whisper silent, it's quite silent, you're talking about a 4200 RPM fan. And if you, actually I was curious, I was like, what if you sort bottom down, like the most loud. The loudest one is going to be 1720 or 1800. And you'll see that the biggest thing that may, you might have to balance is the noise in the CFM, which is the cubic feet per minute. More cubic feet per minute, more cooling power. So what is it that you have to find out, what is the minimum you need for the CFM? Again, I don't know. And I think it sort of depends also what kind of things you're printing or you're using a heated bed or what kind of extrusion. But if you're just going for noise, the quietest one is 14 dB, it's 1400 RPM, it's five CFM. There are 18 dB, there's two 18 dB options here, and these are gonna be about six CFM. So you've got three good options. This one here is five and these are six CFM. This one is two wire, this is two wire and this one is three. So again, it depends on whether you need it to comment or output. But if you just need two wires, this is a great option. This is about 10 bucks, $12 per. It's a nice thin fan. Looks like it's got plenty of mounting holes and you can also even check out the 3D so you can make sure is the thickness what you expect for your fan. But I think this would be a good option. So try it out and there's a lot in stock. This is a very popular fan. I think a lot of people are looking for quiet, 24 volt, 40 millimeter fans. So I hope you're a fan of this 3D printing hot end replacement fan. Try it out, let us know if it works for you. That's a great search. Thank you.